{"id":176431240,"date":"2014-01-20T00:37:26","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T06:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/?p=176431240"},"modified":"2014-01-20T00:39:50","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T06:39:50","slug":"history-obama-melville-and-the-tea-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/2014\/01\/20\/history-obama-melville-and-the-tea-party\/","title":{"rendered":"HISTORY: Obama, Melville and the Tea Party"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" id=\"mastheadLogo\" alt=\"The New York Times\" src=\"http:\/\/i1.nyt.com\/images\/misc\/nytlogo379x64.gif\" width=\"379\" height=\"64\" \/><br \/>\nJAN. 18, 2014<\/p>\n<header>\n<h1 itemprop=\"headline\"><\/h1>\n<h1 itemprop=\"headline\"><\/h1>\n<h1 itemprop=\"headline\"><\/h1>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: xx-large;\"><strong>Obama, Melville and the Tea Party<\/p>\n<p><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\"><strong>By\u00a0GREG GRANDIN<\/strong><\/span><time datetime=\"2014-01-18\"> <\/time><\/p>\n<div>\n<div id=\"attachment_176431241\" style=\"width: 655px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/MELVILLE-superJumbo.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-176431241\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\" wp-image-176431241 \" alt=\"Slaves revolt against their slavers aboard a ship in 1844. \/ Corbis\" src=\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/MELVILLE-superJumbo-1024x819.jpg\" width=\"645\" height=\"516\" srcset=\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/MELVILLE-superJumbo-1024x819.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/MELVILLE-superJumbo-300x239.jpg 300w, http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/MELVILLE-superJumbo-920x735.jpg 920w, http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/MELVILLE-superJumbo.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 645px) 100vw, 645px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-176431241\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><span style=\"font-size: small; color: #000000;\"><strong>Slaves revolt against their slavers aboard a ship in 1844. \/ Corbis<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<div>\n<div><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"333\" data-total-count=\"333\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">IN 2009, shortly after Barack Obama\u2019s successful campaign for the White House, the McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan organized a display of about 50 books that Mr. Obama had read as a young man. The titles were eclectic, with a good number by African-American authors, including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"532\" data-total-count=\"865\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">As a candidate, Mr. Obama demonstrated a remarkable rhetorical ability to present himself as both inhabiting and escaping from the worlds created by these writers. He even modeled his much praised memoir, \u201cDreams From My Father,\u201d on Ellison\u2019s 1952 novel, \u201cInvisible Man.\u201d Yet where Ellison\u2019s young, idealistic black protagonist remains anonymous \u2014 the book ends with him alone in his underground apartment \u2014 Mr. Obama won the White House, inaugurating what many at the time hoped was a new, \u201cpostracial\u201d America.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"210\" data-total-count=\"1075\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">That optimism turned out to be premature. Today, anti-Obama signs with racist language accompany Tea Party rallies; a Confederate flag is unfurled in front of the White House to protest the government shutdown.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"317\" data-total-count=\"1392\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Looking back, there was one book in the McNally Jackson display, overlooked at the time, that could have helped us anticipate all this. That book was \u201cBenito Cereno,\u201d a largely forgotten masterpiece by Herman Melville. In today\u2019s charged political environment, the message of Melville\u2019s story bears rehearing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"635\" data-total-count=\"2027\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">\u201cBenito Cereno\u201d tells the story of Amasa Delano, a New England sea captain who, in the South Pacific, spends all day on a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans who he thinks are slaves. They aren\u2019t. Unbeknown to Delano, they had earlier risen up, slaughtered most of the crew and demanded that the captain, Benito Cereno, return them home to Senegal. After Delano boards the ship (to offer his assistance), the West Africans keep their rebellion a secret by acting as if they are still slaves. Their leader, a man named Babo, pretends to be Cereno\u2019s loyal servant, while actually keeping a close eye on him.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"451\" data-total-count=\"2478\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Melville narrates the events from the perspective of the clueless Delano, who for most of the novella thinks Cereno is in charge. As the day progresses, Delano grows increasingly obsessed with Babo and the seeming affection with which the West African cares for the Spanish captain. The New Englander, liberal in his sentiments and opposed to slavery as a matter of course, fantasizes about being waited on by such a devoted and cheerful body servant.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"446\" data-total-count=\"2924\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Delano believes himself a free man, and he defines his freedom in opposition to the smiling, open-faced Babo, who he presumes has no interior life, no ideas or interests of his own. Delano sees what he wants to see. But when Delano ultimately discovers the truth \u2014 that Babo, in fact, is the one exercising masterly discipline over his inner thoughts, and that it is Delano who is enslaved to his illusions \u2014 he responds with savage violence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"334\" data-total-count=\"3258\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Barack Obama may have avoided the fate of the protagonist of \u201cInvisible Man,\u201d but he hasn\u2019t been able to escape the shadow of Babo. He is Babo, or at least he is to a significant part of the American population \u2014 including many of the white rank and file of the Republican Party and the Tea Party politicians they help elect.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"583\" data-total-count=\"3841\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">\u201cBenito Cereno\u201d is based on a true historical incident, which I started researching around the time Mr. Obama announced his first bid for the presidency. Since then, I\u2019ve been struck by the persistence of fears, which began even before his election, that Mr. Obama isn\u2019t what he seems: that instead of being a faithful public servant he is carrying out a leftist plot hatched decades ago to destroy America; or if not that, then he is a secret Muslim intent on supplanting the Constitution with Islamic law; or a Kenyan-born anti-colonialist out to avenge his native Africa.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"648\" data-total-count=\"4489\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy. In order to succeed as a politician, Mr. Obama had to cultivate what many have described as an almost preternatural dominion over his inner self. He had to become a \u201cblank screen,\u201d as Mr. Obama himself has put it, on which others could project their ideals \u2014 just as Babo is for Delano. Yet this intense self-control seems to be what drives the president\u2019s more feverish detractors into a frenzy; they fill that screen with hatreds drawn deep from America\u2019s historical subconscious.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"609\" data-total-count=\"5098\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Published in late 1855, as the United States moved toward the Civil War, \u201cBenito Cereno\u201d is one of the most despairing stories in American literature. Amasa Delano represents a new kind of racism, based not on theological or philosophical doctrine but rather on the emotional need to measure one\u2019s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another\u2019s absolute slavishness. This was a racism that was born in chattel slavery but didn\u2019t die with chattel slavery, instead evolving into today\u2019s cult of individual supremacy, which, try as it might, can\u2019t seem to shake off its white supremacist roots.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"346\" data-total-count=\"5444\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">THIS helps explain those Confederate flags that appear at conservative rallies, as well as why Tea Party-backed politicians like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul insist on equating federal policies they don\u2019t like with chattel bondage. Believing in the \u201cright to health care,\u201d Mr. Paul once said, is \u201cbasically saying you believe in slavery.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"421\" data-total-count=\"5865\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">As for Mr. Obama, he continues to invoke fantasies that seem drawn straight from Melville\u2019s imagination. One Republican councilman, in Michigan, attended a protest carrying an image of Mr. Obama\u2019s decapitated head on a pike, which happens to be the very fate that befalls Babo once his ruse unravels. Another Republican ran for Congress in Florida with a commercial featuring Mr. Obama as the captain of a slave ship.<\/span><\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"articleBody\" data-para-count=\"412\" data-total-count=\"6277\"><span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\">Over 60 years ago, Ralph Ellison began \u201cInvisible Man\u201d with an epigraph drawn from \u201cBenito Cereno.\u201d It\u2019s a pleading question that Delano asks Cereno after the revolt is put down and Babo is executed: \u201cYou are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?\u201d Though Ellison purposefully omitted it from his epigraph, in today\u2019s America it is still worth recalling Cereno\u2019s answer: \u201cThe Negro.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<footer>\n<div>\n<div>+++++++++++++++++ <span style=\"color: #000000; font-size: medium;\"><strong>Greg Grandin<\/strong> is a professor of history at New York University and the author of \u201cThe Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/footer>\n<p>\u00a0 &gt;via:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/01\/19\/opinion\/sunday\/obama-melville-and-the-tea-party.html?smid=fb-share&amp;_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/01\/19\/opinion\/sunday\/obama-melville-and-the-tea-party.html?smid=fb-share&amp;_r=0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>JAN. 18, 2014 Obama, Melville and the Tea Party &nbsp; &nbsp; By\u00a0GREG GRANDIN \u00a0 IN 2009, shortly after Barack Obama\u2019s successful campaign for the White House, the McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan organized a display of about 50 books that Mr. Obama had read as a young man. The titles were eclectic, with a good [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[6],"tags":[4,12,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176431240"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176431240"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176431240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176431289,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176431240\/revisions\/176431289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176431240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176431240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176431240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}